A plug for putty kinves as DIY material

[Gordon Airporte]

I cut one of these up to make wrenches and realized how handy it is that the thickness of the blade tapers down. Gives you a versatile double ended wrench - one end almost key width, the other thin.
But omg are these things HARD, so heat treatment is a must before you start working on it. (I'll will say that it took me a while to admit this ) I couldn't get it to glow uniformly with a blowtorch, but I finally hit on the idea of heating it up in a charcoal grill (after the hamburgers were off.) I just buried it in a pile of coals and gave it a couple of minutes, then removed to air cool slowly in a sealed, insulated jar. Works fine now, and I know that it's possible to make this steel very tough.

[ThE_MasteR]

Do you mean putty knives ? If so, how did you make a tension wrench out of it ?

[sivlogkart]

I will give this one some thought, as I think I have an old one somewhere.

KJ

[Gordon Airporte]

Do you mean putty knives ? If so, how did you make a tension wrench out of it ?

Why yes, yes I did mean 'knives'....yeah. Not very helpful to the search feature.
What you do is get any plastic handle off, heat it up to glowing red/orange, let it cool down slowly, cut it in to strips, bend/file them as you see fit, sand them finished, then heat treat them again to harden if you think you need it (not the same way though).
You can get quite a few wrenches out of a wider knife. I was able to use the really thick metal of the handle too - on mine it was about as thick as your average key.
I can post pics if anyone wants.

[sivlogkart]

Pictures are always welcome.

KJ

[Gordon Airporte]

Okay, here we go. This tinypic thing sure is handy.

This is how I carved the putty knife up. You can see where the two wrenches came from:




Here's the wrench made from the blade, so you can see the way the thickness tapers:





Here's the wrench made from the handle of the knife. You can see bluing from the final heat treating on the far right. It only needed a little bit of filing to thin it down so it fit like that.




The large piece of the putty knife blade is kind of blotchy because I heated it with a propane torch, thus not so uniformly. I had no real difficulty ripping that strip off of the handle using a hack saw. It would have been impossible without having heat treated it first though.

[chopitup]

That's pretty cool.

[skold]

That does look like a good idea, looks useful aswell, how does it work i wonder? looks like it works well.

[Gordon Airporte]

The one shown in the lock (Brinks shrouded) works great, but it was made specifically for it and is too thick (~.048") for most of the other locks I've tried it in. It should be good in wafer locks though, they're usually pretty wide. That lock was really giving me a run for my money (all $10 it cost me) so I figured I wanted my trouble to come only from the lock and not my tools. I totally have that lock down now
The thick end of the double ended wrench works well in many locks, mostly at the bottom of the keyway (away from the pins.) It's around .042" thick, .11" wide, and .3" long, fwiw. Unfortunately I made the thin end too narrow (.01" thick, .10" wide) so it doesn't get much use. I also have to experiment more with heat treating the thin end because it's too soft and bends.

[Chrispy]

Nice. I like it.